About us

Africa’s first independent fact-checking organisation

Africa Check is a non-profit organisation set up in 2012 to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in Africa. The goal of our work is to raise the quality of information available to society across the continent.

As former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says: “For democracies to function properly, for people to make informed decisions about their lives, the claims made in the public domain must be held up to scrutiny and their veracity checked openly and impartially.

“I salute the work of Africa Check, as an important initiative engaging with journalists and citizens across the continent to raise the level of public debate.”

Devised by the non-profit media development arm of the international news agency AFP, Africa Check is an independent organisation with offices in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar and London, producing reports in English and French testing claims made by public figures, institutions and the media against the best available evidence.

Since 2012, we have fact-checked hundreds of claims on topics from crime and race in South Africa to population numbers in Nigeria and fake health cures in countries around Africa.

Africa Check’s work is published and discussed in media across the continent.

Since October 2015, we have a fact-checking team based at the EJICOM journalism school in Dakar, Senegal, running our French-language site.

They work in liaison with the project director and finance team in London, who answer to a five-member independent board. See details of the team here.

Africa Check also have regional offices in Lagos, Nigeria since late 2016 and Nairobi, Kenya since the beginning of 2017.

Working with you & the media

Of course, with hundreds of millions of claims of one sort of another being made every day across Africa, it is never going to be possible for one organisation to fact-check every claim made.

That is why Africa Check works with you, our readers, to identify the claims you want checked, as well as works to enable and encourage others in the media to check claims themselves.

We do this through the range of resources we provide in the ‘How to Fact-Check’ section of the website, through the reports we produce and the awards programme we run.

Funding, training & research services

Africa Check’s funding to date has come primarily in the form of support-in-kind from the AFP Foundation, the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, and the EJICOM journalism school, and grants from a variety of philanthropic institutions.

Since 2012, Africa Check has received generous support from the following institutions:

At the same time, Africa Check works to supplement this with donations from members of the public who support our work and, since May 2015, with income earned by our commercial Training, Research and Income services unit: TRI Facts.

Africa Check aims to build up TRI Facts to account for more than 10% of our total income in 2016 and more than 20% the following year. More details of our funding work are set out on the page: How we are funded.

Donate to Africa Check

We hold public figures accountable

For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially. Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results.